


Vacivitas

by CastellanKurze



Category: Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers, Gen, takes place after 5.0
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-07
Updated: 2020-03-07
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:54:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23054293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CastellanKurze/pseuds/CastellanKurze
Summary: Everyone grapples with inevitability - even the inevitable themselves.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	Vacivitas

**Author's Note:**

> Written just after the expansion dropped, before 5.1/5.2 came around.

Solitude, true solitude, was a concept which the mortal mind could grasp only by the very edges of its fabric.

Mount a horse and ride out to the forest, far from civilization, and go on foot to the most sheltered glade to be found. Stand and bask there in the quietude, wherein insects will yet buzz and birds will yet chirp.

Take a boat from a harbor on the most still and silent day, and row out until the land fades from silent. In still waters, like unto a mirror beneath the sky, the craft beneath you will yet rock with the faintest motion, setting ripples to spread outward from the wooden planks.

Climb the highest mountain to be found. Climb beyond the plant life, beyond the animals and birds and the most tenacious dwellers in the hills. Naught but rock and snow beneath one’s feet, yet the wind yet blows, it touch light as feathers upon one’s skin.

No place in the world could offer it. One had to look beyond the boundaries of existence.

An expanse of colorless rock and dust, stretching out in all directions. Above the horizon, a distant pool of golden light. And hanging overhead, a great blue marble, streaked with white and brown. There was no sound to be had, no touch to be felt, not even the faintest breath of wind. His feet did not crunch in the dirt - even had there been air to carry the sound, he left no footprints, for his steps were not so crude as to impact upon the dust itself.

A thousand thousand times he had trod the surface of the silent globe, and yet the most intensive study would have revealed no trace of any passage. To affect was not his affectation by nature.

He stood, as still and silent as one of the rocks themselves, looking up at the globe that hung in the heavens beyond. From this distance, to a mortal eye, it looked as serene and silent as the immediate vicinity - distance and the perception of time did not allow for the sense of change as storms tracked across the surface of the world, or the turning of the great sphere itself beneath the warmth of the sun. It would have taken a truly vast and calculating intellect to determine the slow progression of this stretch of cloud or that hurricane, a capacity for patience well beyond anything a mortal mind could muster to watch as an island was swallowed beneath crystals of ice water and emerged hours later.

His white robes hung about him, but he did not feel their touch, for he had no desire to employ the sensation at this moment. Beneath his crimson mask his mouth was unguarded, and yet the vacuum of space held no horror for him, no swift and silent death. The essence of his being was beyond such crude matters.

Beyond the need for hunger. Or thirst.

Beyond the need for air.

Beyond…life.

A thousand, thousand times he had paced the lunar surface, his mind a cacophony of plan and counterplan, stratagem and tactic. Wherein the silent gulf of space lay without, within might be a supernova, a thousand different thoughts all racing in joint motion, as a hundred-piece symphony might hold a note of perfect harmony in response to the wave of the conductor’s baton.

Emissary.

A being to bridge the gulfs between one and the other.

A bridge between.

A bridge between…

Between…

There was no rustle of cloth as he raised his hand. Behind his crimson, eyeless mask, behind his closed lips, Elidibus’ mind was searching the immediate vicinity, cataloging every grain of dust, every fallen stone, every shard, every splinter, considering, weighing, rejecting, listing each piece which met his silent criteria, until as one, in all directions around him, a set of stones emerged from the lunar dust and came sailing silently, gracefully through the vacuum, until like rogue planets settling around an unseeing star, the hovered and circled in front of him.

His choices conformed to his specifications exactly. The largest was nearly the size of his fist, roughly ovoid, with a jagged spur that jutted from one side. The others were all of a character - approximately rounded, each half the size of the largest. All were grey and lifeless. They hung in the air, slowing until they were motionless, the largest forming the anchor of the pattern, the other thirteen strung like pearls in a perfect circle.

Elidibus regarded them, silent and inscrutable, his hand held out towards the hanging stones.

_Somewhere in the distant past, untold thousands of years ago, two figures faced one another, arms spread in entreaty as they stepped round one another in point and counterpoint. Mortals would have struggled for terminology - giants; angels; demigods; nephilim - limited minds fighting desperately to conceive of words which could the robed creatures possessed of such ecstatic grace and poise._

_“Look upon us,” one would have said in words which were not words so much as concepts given life. "What is the truth of our struggle? Our people spend their days in exercise of pure thought. All that we can conceive is our creation; our consideration is our conclusion. We have but one limit, and that is the strength of our own mind.“_

Elidibus made a motion, and the long, curving claw that mounted the thumb of his gauntlet circled round that of his index finger. Deep inside one of the stones, the chemical bonds which held the rock together began to fray and collapse; outwardly there would have been no sign of anything wrong, until the moment that the Emissary flexed his will and the entire stone burst into a puff of dust, a halo that hung in the air around the remaining stones, defying the moon’s weak gravity.

It had been the one immediately to the left of the largest - the first in the chain, or perhaps depending on the view, the last.

_"And yet look upon us,” the other figure in that age before ages argued back. "We are motionless. We are still. We reach for nothing, for all we reach for is no more than that which shall appear within our hands. We have no more want, and so it is that we want no more.“_

Elidibus circled his thumb the other way, and another of the stones burst, adding its glinting cloud of dust to that of the one which had collapsed first.

_"What more should we want?” replied the first. "Are we to be shamed as indolents? We have learned all that we need. We have found all that we need. Is there any more?“_

Another stone burst. Another cloud of dust amidst the circle.

_"But what if there is? What if there is yet some higher plane, some higher peak beyond us, but we do not see it because we do not lift our eyes? Oh certainly we speak in hypothetical, but let us consider, have we truly no further need of discovery, of challenge? Perhaps we have learned all we need, but have we learned all there is? Surely not!”_

Another stone.

_“But this is academic. Look you to our past, and look you to our present. No person across all the world goes hungry, no person across all the world goes thirsty. We have have banished want. Hardship lies buried with those who went before. What if there is more? I say, why have we need to care if there is? Are we to invite hunger back into our homes, only so that we yearn to be fed?”_

Another.

_“Do not misunderstand me, I call for no deprivations, no enforced suffering. But we are complacent. I say again, what if some new peak may lie just out of reach, and the only reason we do not see it is because we do not lift our eyes from our diversions and our distractions. What if some terrible thing were to happen, something beyond our current capacity to understand, and we were left defenseless because we did not stretch beyond our reach?”_

And another.

_“Oh come, this ventures upon farce. We have looked down into the molten heart of our world, and up to the stars above, and explored the winds of aether itself. We have come to know our existence with a precision undreamed of. We cannot be expected to explore forever - eventually we come to know all that there is. How long must one study, say, a flower, before there is truly nothing left to learn? An obsession with precision is its own sort of indolence, is it not?”_

A seventh of the stones cracked and collapsed into powder, such that by now the remaining stones were well haloed by the dust left behind by the repeated acts of destruction, leaving open gaps in what had previously been a perfectly-ordered circle.

Gaps. A nothingness, where previously there had been existence.

 **“Did we forsee it all?”** Elidibus wondered aloud. Despite the lack of oxygen, his lips and tongue formed the words, and the concept burst forth from his being, unimpeded by mere physical impossibility. The Emissary moved his thumb and forefinger in counterpoint, and the conglomeration of stone and dust began to move in a slow rotation, the little rocks orbiting in a complex pattern around the largest, accompanied by the billowing of the dust cloud.

But they had foreseen it, _glibly_ , even.

“When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning or in rain?” the question had been asked with humor, as it had ever been.

For so they had been.

Lahabrea, stern and resolute, the booming thunder, the shock of explosive power, he who could bellow down the storm itself, smashing obstacles with overwhelming force.

Emet-selch, the rain, the soft patter of a million droplets, everywhere and nowhere, fluid and formless, ever washing away the edges of reality until it took the shape he desired.

And Elidibus. The lightning. Unseen, unfelt until the moment he struck, in the precise shape and moment he envisioned, appearing and disappearing with such perfect intention that he could not be predicted, nor prevented.

Elidibus. The lightning. The Emissary. The bridge…the bridge between…

He watched the miniature system whirl about, directed by will alone.

Solitude, true solitude, was a concept which the mortal mind could grasp only by the very edges of its fabric.

Perhaps so too was isolation.

As the stones and dust continued to dance around the central rock, Elidibus focused upon the spur that jutted from its surface. It was a minor imperfection, all told, just a enough of a facet that, placed on terra firma rather than luna, a mortal might have cut their thumb upon in clumsiness. Elidibus focused upon the soft, carbonaceous interior of the spur, the effort of his will reshaping it invisibly beneath the dull, lifeless surface. The Emissary watched the molecules dance and refashion themselves into the desired pattern, until finally with a motion of his outstretched fingertips he caused the brittle shell to break away, revealing the glittering diamond he had forged beneath. It stood proudly from the surface of the rock, glinting in the ambient light, and Elidibus reflected that were he a thousandth of his size, stood upon the rock it would have towered above him like a great, crystalline beacon.

The motion of the stones slowed and stopped, and as Elidibus slowly curled his fingers inward so too did the conglomeration shrink upon itself, the remaining stones collapsing like their predecessors into dust and powder. The central rock collapsed as well even as it compacted beneath the rain of dust, the diamond vanishing beneath the churning mass of lunar dirt as it slowly formed a single, fist-sized globe which drew nearer to the Emissary’s hand until it floated just beyond the claws of his glove.

There, the dust reformed into a perfect, glassy mirror as the Ascian reshaped the chemical bonds once more, until he could see a distorted version of his own face looked back at him. He regarded the image for some while, until finally he lowered his head and, almost casually, waved his hand. The sphere flew off like a thrown object, thudding into the dust like a miniature meteor, leaving a small trail and a mound against its preceding edge that would, in the vacuum, last for millennia.

And then there was, once more, a perfect solitude.

And then there was, as perhaps there had never been, a perfect emptiness.


End file.
